Medical Program: New Treatment Strategies for HER2+ Breast Cancer: The Latest from ASCO

Announcer:
You’re listening to Breaking Boundaries in Breast Cancer on ReachMD, sponsored by Lilly.
On this episode, we’ll hear from Dr. Sara Tolaney, breast medical oncologist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, who shares some of the newest investigational treatment strategies for HER2 positive breast cancer that were highlighted at the 2020 ASCO Annual Meeting. Here’s Dr. Tolaney now.

Dr. Tolaney:
So we’ve been very excited about all the new strategies that have been emerging to treat HER2-positive disease. Even just in the last 6 months we’ve seen 3 different FDA approvals in the metastatic HER2-positive setting, one for the HER2CLIMB regimen with capecitabine, tucatinib, trastuzumab, another for trastuzumab deruxtecan, a very novel antibody drug conjugate with very impressive activity, and then also an approval for capecitabine and neratinib, so I think the space is very encouraging to see so many new treatment options for our patients.

At ASCO, I’m excited to see further data about how to best treat our patients. We’ll see data from the KAITLIN trial. This was an adjuvant trial that looked at replacing adjuvant THP with T-DM1 and pertuzumab after adjuvant anthracycline therapy, so we’ll have to await data to see if there’s a role for T-DM1 and pertuzumab in this space. And there is also an interest in trying to further de-escalate therapy for patients with HER2-positive disease. As we develop better and better biologic therapies, I think it really gives us the option to see if maybe we could omit chemotherapy in select patients. And so we’ll also see data from a trial that is looking at obtaining PET imaging to ascertain early response to dual HER2 antibody therapy, and if those patients have PET response, they go on to continue antibody therapy alone rather than escalating to adding chemotherapy, and so it will be interesting to see if we are able to better select patients for de-escalation strategies.

Announcer:
That was Dr. Sara Tolaney discussing the upcoming treatment strategies for patients with HER2 positive breast cancer. To revisit any part of this discussion and to access other episodes in this series, visit ReachMD.com where you can Be Part of the Knowledge. Thank you for listening.